David Quinn
Christianity offers an antidote to a harmful individualism, writes David Quinn
A meeting of bishops from all around the world is currently taking place in Rome. Its purpose is to look at the relationship between the Church and young people. There is no one way to look at this question because a huge amount depends on the part of the world in which the Church finds itself.
In parts of the developing world, for example, many young Catholics are actively involved in the life of the Church. In much of the Western world, not least Ireland, it is another story entirely.
In the recent abortion referendum, just 13% of young people aged 18-24 voted in favour of the right to life, according to an RTÉ exit poll. It would have been much the same in the marriage referendum of May 2015. This tabulates closely with the results of the European Social Survey from 2016 which found that a similar percentage of this age group attends Mass each week.
But on the other hand, perhaps the Catholic Church shouldn’t take it too personally. Other churches are in the same boat, and so is politics to a large degree. Only about one in 50 people have worked in a political party or action group in the last 12 months according to the same survey, and fewer than 10% of young people aged 18-24 say they are ‘very interested’ in politics.
The fact that so few young people (or adults in general) have worked for a political party in the last 12 months contradicts the notion in some Church circles that young people are far more active in political life than they are in religious life.
While it’s true that many young people went about sporting ‘repeal’ badges during the referendum and advertising their voting intentions on social media, only a fraction actually joined an organisation, let alone went door-to-door canvassing.
However, it can’t be denied that young adults are far more likely today to be secular than religious and are very likely to have a ‘tolerant’ outlook, meaning that they are very tolerant towards different personal choices (including abortion), because they want their own personal choices to be tolerated as well. This fits in with their overall outlook of extreme moral individualism.
Of course, what is often not visible to them are the bad effects this moral individualism can have on them personally. Their parents may exercise their personal freedom and divorce, for example, with all the bad effects this can have on their children. A boyfriend might abandon a girlfriend when she is pregnant. The detachment of sex from emotional involvement, never mind marriage, is having all kinds of harmful effects, which the #MeToo movement, for all its excesses, is helping to reveal.
The social scientist Christian Smith wrote a book in 2011 called Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood. He identifies five major problems facing many young people today: confused moral reasoning, routine intoxication, materialistic life goals, regrettable sexual experiences and disengagement from civic and political life.
‘Emerging adulthood’ refers to the period during which people transition from adolescence into adulthood. It doesn’t refer to physical adulthood. It refers to taking on the responsibilities of adult life, for example a long-term job, marriage, children. It now commonly takes many people until they are in their 30s to reach this point.
The problems Smith pinpoints, which are most intense from the late teens until 30 or so, are almost all consequences of the highly individualistic way in which life is now viewed. Lots of older adults suffer from the same problems, but they seem worse in that age group.
Confused moral reasoning arises from moral relativism. People think they can design their own moral codes and often do in a very confused or plain bad way.
Routine drunkenness was designed neither today nor yesterday, so is not a problem of modernity as such.
Materialistic lifegoals are particularly likely to arise when you have no ultimate, transcendent goal in life. In other words, material consumption becomes more important than it ought to be. Regrettable sexual experiences become more commonplace when the physical aspect of sex is ‘freed’ from the emotional aspect.
Disengagement
To the problem of disengagement from civic and political life, which Smith refers to, can be added religion, but we see again how it is not only religion that is affected by making personal choice everything.
What Christianity offers to young people is an antidote to this individualism, if only they can be brought to see it as such.
Christianity says love is the key to a good life, not individualism. People often don’t recognise that the latter can work against the former. They think if they can pursue whatever choices they want, this will obviously include choosing the right person to love, but love in the proper sense involves huge amounts of self-sacrifice and commitment.
Individualism, on the other hand, says nothing should be allowed to tie you down for long if it makes you unhappy. You must always be free to walk away from your commitments and one day that might mean someone walking away from the commitment they have made to you.
In other words, the kind of individualism that is so popular today, and which young people think is absolutely indispensable to the good life, often leads to a dog-eat-dog world in which people ‘buy’ their happiness at the expense of someone else’s.
They must be brought to see how disastrous this can be and how the true understanding of love that is at the heart of Christianity and which was preached and lived by Christ, offers a far better route not just to the (morally) good life, but the happy life.
The Synod underway in Rome is discussing themes like this. The challenge before the Church is to find the best way to communicate this message, and the right people to do it.